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Thursday, October 25, 2012

First short story up on Smashwords!

Well, I’ve put my first short story up for free on
Smashwords.com, and I feel pretty good about that.I have written ever since I was old enough to
know which end of the pencil not to stick up my nose.(Turns out it’s both.Who knew?)But before I completed The Affair of the Atil Artifact, I had never
actually finished any story I had ever started to write.That’s changing, now.I’m not precisely certain what it was, but
something has given me more focus, and I am concentrating.I used to just write bits and pieces of
stories and then say to myself: “Meh, connect them together later.”But the problem there is that it turns out
that my plots tend to develop as I write, and so the bits and pieces I write
here-and-there wind up not belonging to the story on which I’m working.I’m sure every other writer has a similar
problem: dozens if not hundreds of little story-snippets on sheets of paper or
word processing files, fugitives from the aether of the imagination, given form
but no function, waiting to belong.I
always feel like I owe those pieces; I brought them into the world, and I need
to find a place for them.And I
will.Eventually.

But Affair of the Atil Artifact was not like that.No, I sat down one day, a light-bulb clicked
on, and then I was off!I churned out
the full story in about a day and a half, and then spent months going through
it, cleaning it up, making it make sense.I hope you enjoy it, and be sure to check back soon for the ongoing
adventures of the British Museum’s Division of Curious Devices and Remarkable
Artifacts!